The Two Charlottes (at Chawton House Library) and Smith’s Ethelinde

Good news for Smith’s Ethelinde, or The Recluse of the Lake (first published 1789) and me. This year at Chawton House Library is the year of the two Charlottes. There will be two conferences for women writers: in May a Bicentennial for Charlotte Bronte’s life and work (13-14 May 2016); and in October Placing Charlotte Smith: Canon, Genre, History, Nation, Globe (14-15 October 2016). I am just so delighted to be able to say (in one breath) that my proposal for a paper on Charlotte Smith to be given at said conference has been accepted, and the publisher of Valancourt Press tells me my edition of Smith’s Ethelinde should be published by later summer, early fall, just in time.

Charlotte Smith (c. 1793-94) by George Romney

Since beginning this Austen Reveries, I’ve written so many blogs and parts of blogs on Smith and her work, quoted so many of her poems. Smith is a long-time deeply beloved poet and novelist for me. When I finished my dissertation on Richardson’s Clarissa and Grandison, the two poets I began to research at the Library Congress equally were Anne Kingsmill Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (as she was known then) and Charlotte Turner Smith. My first research shelf at the LofB showed how I was torn between my love for Smith’s books and desire to read them and research into Anne Ward Radcliffe whose books were available but criticism of whom was hard to find (another long-time love, in Radcliffe’s case since I was about 17-18). In 1980 I had a copy of Smith’s Young Philosopher on it — at the time the only way you could read most of Smith’s novels was in a rare book room or on microfilm or microfiche. I also had reprints of dissertations on Radcliffe. I spent long hours on Saturdays and Sundays studying Smith’s poetry, reading through her novels, and learning (as I thought) from psychoanalytical analyses of Radcliffe’s Udolpho (I still have not rejected them). How the situation has changed. For Smith there was hardly any criticism or scholarship (the big serious work was by Florence Hilbish). Now the articles pour out and books steadily increase from post-colonial to close reading perspectives. Now I’ve done a historical study of Radcliffe’s political travel book, A Journey Made in the Summer 1794 (“The Nightmare History … “).

Furness Abbey, Cumbria, which Radcliffe researched, explored with her husband and writes of

At this point (more than 30 years later) only two of Smith’s major novels have not been published in the last quarter century in affordable editions: Ethelinde and Marchmont. After August, there will be only one.

Here’s the proposal:

Ethelinde as a Postcolonial novel: the money motive, the sex instinct, the landscapes, and a new edition

– “as woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.” – Woolf, Three Guineas

Known for its Scottish and Grasmere landscapes, Smith’s long novel ranges across England into France, Germany, to ocean border places, to the Carribean and allusively into India. In this second and seriously aspirational, innovative, and absorbing book, Smith depicts an inescapable patronage, capitalist, and debt-prison system; war through the horrors of battle and parliamentary careers; the use of marriage for gain, based on punitive repression, from the viewpoint of a male with idealistic adulterous longings. Long inset histories tell of women who find survival and a decent life by living with a man outside marriage; one of these is the mother of the recluse of the book, herself the mother of one of the book’s heroes. It has strong picturesque and realistic landscape beauty. Yet repeatedly this has been the novel writers choose not to deal with in depth. The reason is not far to seek: there has been no individual affordable text since 1790. This spring Valancourt Press will remedy this situation by publishing a newly prepared text, introduction, and annotations by me.

I propose a paper which I hope will also help reclaim a novel whose rarity until recently has made countering unfavorable older appraisals difficult. I will place Ethelinde among a tradition of women’s writing from a post-colonial perspective. I will argue the social construction of Smith’s gendered experience of life, which led to a corrosion of her emotional life that she was never given circumstances to heal from; a destruction of her and most of her children’s prospects, to her and their displacements and devastation, gave her insight into people living in subaltern positions in the peripheries and centers of empire, as well as exiled, refugee and enslaved people. Since Scotland features in Ethelinde‘s symbolic weave, my trajectory will include how Scotland is used in The Young Philosopher, Smith’s last novel, and my line of texts will be Scottish. My candidates for brief comparison will move from life-writing by Anne Grant, to a novel set in Scotland by Margaret Oliphant, and finally poetry by Carol Ann Duffy. I will read Smith’s creations of Scotland as a form of sympathetic reciprocal making, an act of appropriation from her reading, local heritage and knowledge of colonial lives, which coheres with the resistance of these Scottish women who map their books with imagined communities of women in mind and also undermine hegemonic male and British norms.

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The Falls of Clyde (1801) by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851)

The topic of course reaches well beyond gender. As I was working on the proposal, an important book for me became Carla Sassi’s Why Scottish Literature Matters. She suggests that “key” tones to Scottish literature after the union (and especially the destruction of folk Scottish culture, the clans, the take over by capitalist of the lowlands) include: a deep experience of dislocation, of internal exile, and “a pervasive cultural malaise.” Kenneth Simpson in his The Protean Scot: The Crisis of Identity in 18th Century Scottish Literature argues we find a multiplicity of voices, fragments of personalities as there are different languages, influential other cultures in Scotland, approximating a modern condition. In the last few days reading Norma Clarke’s cultural biography of Oliver Goldsmith (as part of Grub Street) I have been seeing the returnees from Ireland, the escapists to England and Europe as in analogous positions. With them (Joyce for example, Sheridan Le Fanu whose House by the Churchyard I read this past January), mimicry disrupts the main discourse by imitating it in a parodic way. The form of displacement is a privileged one (when aware writers remain in periphery they experience internal exile as Azar Nafasi and others call it). Susan Ferrier in her Marriage, Macpherson in his Ossian poems, Elizabeth Bowen in the 20th century, Anne Enright today are all engaged in acts of appropriation and compromise.

Still, there is nothing I enjoy more than reading Scottish writing by women and looking at landscape art attributed to or by women. Like Anne Grant and Anne Home Hunter, both of whom are Scottish by origin, but moved about (Grant the most widely). My idea is the global perspective is naturally a woman’s and Smith has it across her works.

Not only that but unlike Grant and Hunter she does not sentimentalize the people in the periphery ; she does not present their culture as spiritually superior (which is what Hunter does and Grant too sometimes), and she is candid on how the exploiters are using the native peoples though she recognizes she is one of the exploiters. That is the value of Ethelinde. She has her hero go off to exploit India to come back with a fortune; he does not because he cannot get himself to behave the way he has to in order to wrest wealth from what’s going on. So she is part of the imperialist class and she has herself not been to these places.

Not that I deny the intensely personal nature of her outlook and her candour about this. Jacqueline Labbe has argued Smith’s use of place is dissolving away under the impetus of her grief; her very identity has no purchase anywhere on the earth because deep-seated fundamental needs in her have been thwarted – and I think it’s her desire for erotic love and companionship with a decent man. Her ambitions which center in her children turn continually to anguish as they are forced to wander about a dangerous amoral world.

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These books, these women authors who write l’ecriture-femme, their mood, their modes are all wrapped up together with Jane Austen for me.

You have read Mrs Smith’s Novels, I suppose? said she to her Companion — , ‘Oh! Yes,’ replied the other, ‘and I am quite delighted with them — They are the sweetest things in the world –‘ ‘And which do you prefer of them?’ ‘Oh! dear, I think there is no comparison between them — Emmeline is so much better than any of the others –‘ ‘Many people think so, I know, but there does not appear so great a disproportion in their Merits to me; do you think it is better written?’ ‘Oh! I do not know anything about that — but it is better in every thing — Besides, Ethelinde it is so long –‘ ‘That is a common objection I believe,’ said Kitty, ‘but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.’ ‘So do I, only I get tired of it before it is finished.’ ‘But did not you find the story of Ethelinde very interesting? and the Descriptions of Grasmere, are not they Beautiful?’ ‘Oh, I missed them all, because I was in such a hurry to know the end of it’ — ” Jane Austen, Catherine, or the Bower

One of Posy Simmonds’s illustrations for Heidi Thomas’s mini-series Cranford Chronicles, adapted from Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, Mr Harrison’s Confessions and My Lady Ludlow: it represents Lady Ludlow’s estate and is reminiscent of pictures of Bignor Park, Sussex, where Smith grew up (site includes a small section on Smith)

Gaskell is my latest love.

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To come down to practicalities, my daughter, Izzy will come with me; she’ll come to the conference for one day, for the other days of sessions and papers, she’ll explore Chawton (see the cottage again) and the surrounding place. Gilbert White’s house is not far; I’ll find out where Steventon is — an archeaological dig is going on. Izzy and I explored Jane Austen sites in Portsmouth and Winchester one summer day using a bus. We were staying in Chichester with Jim that week. There will be a day going to Charlotte Smith sites which tour she’ll come on. Then we’ll have three days in London.

This may be by one of several amateur women landscape artists of the later 18th century (it may not); and I am not sure of her last name — her first is Anna and she was perhaps Polish (such is still the state of studies of women artists)

6 Responses

Diane Reynolds: Congrats Ellen on both accomplishments! When will you be at Chawton House?”

Elissa: “How wonderful to be able to attend and perhaps even participate in both — but for most of us, alas, a dream….”

Thank you so much to Diane and Elissa. Elissa, this will be the first affordable edition of the novel since the early 19th century. Diane, the Charlotte Smith conference is the 14th through the 16th of October. There are two Charlotte conferences at Chawton library this year. The first coming up, May, is on Charlotte Bronte.

[…] good news I told about on my Austen reveries blog that my proposal for a paper on Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde</em> has been accepted for the coming Chawton House Library conference and my edition of the novel […]

[…] standpoint; that meant reading about and works written in, and films from Australia as context; for Charlotte Smith this summer I am on the same wave length of a perspective, but the focus texts are two of her novels partly in […]